A preteen girl manages to convince her entire community (most importantly, her king) that she can see the future. This gives her more power than almost anyone else in said community, but she recognizes how fleeting it is.
I also want to say that this book by Nicola Griffith is a perfect example of why I consider it acceptable to buy books even when I know I won’t be able to read them in the near future. I checked Goodreads and it said I first added it to my TBR list 10 years ago! It sat on my shelf for a decade, and when I was ready to read it, it was there for me.
I also appreciate the fact that I had finished a book and I wasn’t sure what I wanted to read next, so I just browsed my shelves until I found something that spoke to me. What captured my attention happened to be a book that had been sitting there for several years.
This is exactly why I love having a full library of a variety of books. So, no matter what I’m in the mood to read, I have something available that can fill that need.
Anyhoo, back to what this book is actually about.
I’m not sure the book ever says exactly when it’s set, but the description on the back of the book says 7th century Britain. Christianity is just starting to make its way into Britain, which is slowly working its way from a tribal society to a society with a more built-up (but still very fluid) hierarchy.
Hild is the younger daughter of a king who gets killed by another king when Hild is only three years old. The book opens with Hild looking back on this as her earliest memory but no one remembers anything from that age. I doubt she was even capable of grasping what was going on around her, much less remembering it years later.
The book is told in third person limited from Hild’s perspective.
Shortly after the story of Hild’s father getting killed, we hear the story of how her mother had a vision when she was pregnant with Hild about how her daughter would be the light of the world. From then on, she drills into everyone around her (including Hild) that her daughter is the light of the world. It turns out to be a pretty strong example of, “If you say it enough times and with enough conviction, it will come true.”
It’s worth mentioning that Hild has an older sister. I can only imagine how she must have felt about her mom making all this fuss over her younger sister. What am I? Chopped liver?
Her mother does not remarry. Instead, she takes her two daughters and joins the court of Edwin, the king who had her husband poisoned. That fact is one of those open secrets. They’re not supposed to talk about it, and Edwin certainly never admits that he had anything to do with it, but everyone knows what happened.
Hild’s mother, Breguswith, holds a grudge against Edwin, not only for killing her husband, but for denying her daughters their future as princesses. Instead of daughters of a king, they are merely nieces of a king (yes, the guy who killed their father is also their uncle. It was very Hamlet-like.)
One way around this is to position her daughter as a fortune teller. When Hild has a dream or notices something that could be portentous, her mother encourages her to tell the king about it in a way that makes it sound like a prophecy. The more Hild’s prophecies come true, the more she solidifies her position as the court fortune-teller.
This earns her the trust of the king and some of his gesiths (knights), but it also earns her a fair amount of fear and distrust among everyone else. She gets called a haeg (witch) a lot, but she doesn’t seem to mind.
To be clear, Hild cannot see the future. She’s just very good at paying attention to what’s going on around her and telling people what they want to hear. Growing up, she spends a lot of time in nature and she learns to see what it means when certain animals move in a certain direction. Whether it’s a storm coming or a harsh winter, Hild never seems to be wrong.
Other times, Hild is just plain lucky. When she has to give the king bad news because she knows a long, hard winter is on its way, she also has to give him good news so he won’t kill the messenger. Since his wife is pregnant at the time, Hild assures him he will have a son and he will be healthy. It’s a hell of a gamble, and she knows it, but the gamble pays off.
I found Hild to be way too observant for a child so young. I kept forgetting she was prepubescent for most of the book because she kept acting like someone much older. It’s one thing to spend enough time with animals to get to know their ways and look out for the warning signs they send, it’s another matter entirely to learn to read people and what they want and what they’re going to do next based on what they say, how they say it, and what they don’t say. That turns out to be where most of Hild’s power comes from.
But Hild recognizes the fleeting nature of power. She notices Edwin get more jumpy as he becomes overking (meaning he’s king of kings) because he’s killed enough kings himself to know that being king puts a target on his back.
As one of Edwin’s most trusted advisors, she is also in a position of great power and influence (and wealth,) but even as a child she’s not naive enough to think that will last. She knows the king can be flighty and temperamental, and when he decides it’s in his best interests to cozy up to the priests of this new God out of Rome, he starts listening to them more and to Hild less. Far from being threatened by this, Hild welcomes the break and starts to think about who she’ll marry.
Not who she wants to marry. But who it will be most advantageous for the king to marry her off to.
Despite her normally uncanny powers of observation, she’s the last one to see it coming when her uncle marries her off to Cian. It’s complicated because she and Cian have been sexually attracted to each other for years by this point, but Hild’s mother told her Hild “can’t have him.” It’s never explicitly stated why she can’t have him, but it is strongly implied that Cian is Hild’s half-brother. They can’t say this out loud because, if the king ever finds out, it will put Cian’s life in danger because he will be a threat to Edwin’s position as overking. He’ll have his own target on his back.
So Cian is kept in the dark for his own safety, but almost everyone else has figured out who his father was. Edwin is one of the last people to figure it out, but he does eventually get there. When he does, he decides the safest course of action is to marry Cian to Hild to get them both out of the way. Hild can’t refuse without explaining her reasoning for refusing, and besides, it’s an order from the king. Also, she doesn’t want to refuse.
In a way, she ends up getting her own happy ending, albeit with a side of incest.
This book is very well written and full of rich descriptions of the scenery and the political turmoil of the time, but it’s also very long and very slow. It’s over 500 pages, and they are dense pages. A lot happens in this book, but it is by no means fast paced. I enjoyed the first two-thirds or so, but then I just wanted to be done and I was frustrated by how long it was taking me to finish the book.
The other thing that frustrated me about this book was the names. They’re all ancient English, Welsh, and Gaelic, which means Hild and Edwin are by far the easiest names to pronounce in this book. The pronunciation of everyone else’s names is anyone’s guess.
She also includes a lot of ancient words, like gesith, haeg, and seax that I had to figure out the meaning of from context or Google. It wasn’t until I was almost done with the book that I realized Griffith included a handy glossary at the back of the book that contained a list of all those ancient words, as well as their meanings. She also included a note on pronunciations, which I definitely wish I had looked at before I started reading.
There is a sequel, Menewood, which just came out last fall. The fact that it took her a decade to write the sequel makes me feel better about the fact that it took me a decade to get around to reading Hild. On the other hand, I’m so tired of this book, that I wouldn’t be surprised if it takes me a decade to be ready to read the sequel.
I also appreciate the author’s note detailing the fact that Hild was a real, live person, who really lived in Britain in the tumultuous seventh century. Of course, the facts of her life that can be verified are few and far between, so Griffith had a lot of wiggle room when it came to the details, but I still think it’s fascinating to know that someone like Hild really lived, and made her mark on history despite not having a lot of direct power.